He must’ve been awfully bad at golf.

Last week, from a professional standpoint, is hard to describe without using the word “cluster.” I would probably take a mulligan on it. It’s part of why there weren’t any posts from me last week. I think I know where it all went wrong, too. Around this time last week, I forgot my thermos, you see. My thermos serves double duty as morning life-giver and lunchtime Ramen Water Measuring Apparatus. So I’m already fucked up from a lack of coffee, and I decide to go hit up the local food truck for eight bucks rather than the ramen I already have and paid a quarter for. Anyway, get home, end up with nasty food poisoning, stomach’s cramping like mad, whole nine yards.

Then we’re in bed, and we hear the dog barf, not hard since he sleeps beside the bed about a foot from my ear. I’m trying very hard not to throw up in the first place, dog isn’t helping, Diana goes and cleans it up. In the middle of cleaning it up, she knocks over a glass in the kitchen. I hear it roll to the edge of the table, then fall off. This thing detonates. It absolutely pulverized, a jet of glass about six feet in every direction. It’s after midnight at this point. I have to hold barf-dog while Diana makes an attempt at getting the glass out of the bedroom carpet. A lint roller is quite good at it, it turns out. It’s after 1 at this point, I’m still feeling very ill and need to be up in four hours, Diana is pretty much done. We decide to both take a sick day. And I don’t regret it, it was the right choice. I’m just bummed that I’m totally out of sick leave for a while. I have like 90 seconds of sick leave left and a doctor’s appointment tomorrow.

We spent several hours of the sick day training, I was teaching her some introductory HTML, CSS, and PHP.

Harder to justify, though, was missing the train the next two opportunities I had. That was just being a lazy asshole, and not very clever either. Yes, I’d rather sit on the couch all sleepy and miss the train, so I get to drive up which requires actual manual doing of things. I don’t even go back to sleep. I don’t get it. Rational awake me doesn’t get it, but irrational half-awake me things it makes total sense.

Friday was a joke of a day, a half-day thanks to “Seasonal Observances.” I was able to script away some work that needed automation for a long while, I’ll probably put that script up as a short post to bluesoul.me.

It just felt like a disjointed week. I was irritated with myself for having to use the sick day, then irritated with myself for needing to drive up three days out of four. It’s needless wear and tear on my car, and it’s needless risk to myself. Plus, I could be doing something in that time. like writing these pieces, or playing something.

The thing is, it’s my fault. Sometimes I have a hard time taking blame when blame is due. It’s well and good for others to hold you accountable, but there also needs to be self-accountability. To say, “yup, I fucked up, that’s on me.” Nobody really likes being blamed, even when there’s no evading the truth of the matter, but it’s necessary. There’s no growth without accountability. If you went your whole life being told that everything you did or said was correct and nothing was your fault, you’d end up insufferable and stupid.

I got some Cities: Skylines in over the week. I’ve got a new city up to pop. 32,000 or so right now, the trouble when you’re a modern city trying to get away from dirty industry is balancing unemployment with overeducated workers. It’s great to have this nice-looking city, but when unemployment is 26% it’s hard to grow the population, and building businesses that hire at the appropriate educational level needs a lot of overhead and infrastructure in place. It’s a great game.

There’s also a telltale grid pattern on my touch-screen. I missed Puzzle Quest.

And yesterday, on a whim, I jumped into FIFA 13. I haven’t bought one since, if you don’t care about rosters or their card game there’s very little reason to buy the new one each year. I’ve never been any good at the game outside of playing as a striker. In my head it’s like, “Oh, it’d be a lot of fun to play as a left center back, really intense meaningful action” and it ends up being player vs. controls, and player vs. camera, and what should be intense is merely frustrating. The whole combination of “camera automatically rotates, and you must magically know which way it’s going to rotate because your directional controls are relative to the camera” is an abominable control scheme nine times out of ten.

Maybe they fixed that in 16. I kind of doubt it.